IT is a long time since Britain’s high streets and football grounds used to be deserted on a Sunday.

But there is still one place you can be guaranteed peace and quiet, undisturbed by people at work: some of our hospitals.

Unfortunately while it is nice for consultants to spend the weekend on the golf course it is proving lethal for their patients.

A report published yesterday by Dr Foster Intelligence, an NHS-based research unit based at Imperial College London, says the death rate in many hospitals increases sharply at the weekend thanks to senior doctors bunking off, leaving desperately ill patients in the hands of trainees.

To the age-old health advice to eat sensibly, take exercise and rest when you feel tired must now be added another piece of medical wisdom:

try to fall ill only between nine and five on a weekday. This is especially true in Scarborough, Nuneaton and Scunthorpe: just a few of the towns whose hospitals were found to have very few senior staff on duty at the weekend and where, as a result, death rates soar on Saturdays and Sundays by 20 per cent.

If there ever were a public service which needs to operate 24 hours a day and seven days a week surely it is the NHS.

Some hospitals, indeed, do offer such a service: if you are admitted to Homerton Hospital in London, for example, you can be sure there will always be a consultant in ultimate charge of your care.

There, consultants are on full duty until 10pm and into the weekend. But for too many hospitals in Britain it is as if we were a nation of strict Sabbatarians, refusing to lift a finger on a Sunday.

There is a clear correlation between weekend death rates and the numbers of senior staff on duty. The 25 per cent of hospitals with the worst weekend death rates were found to have an average of just 0.8 senior staff on duty at the weekend.

The best 25 per cent had an average of 41. It isn’t just senior doctors who are missing at the weekend: the study revealed an astonishing discrepancy in the ratio of beds to nurses on duty on a Sunday morning, from 2.17 in the case of Northwick Park Hospital in London to a shocking 18.75 in the case of Kettering General Hospital.

The findings come on top of revelations of the collapse of out-of-hours GP service. In 2009, Suffolk toddler Taylor Smith died of meningitis after his parents were made to wait three hours for a doctor to respond to their 2am emergency call.

It was later revealed that the county – which has a population of 600,000 – had just two GPs on night-time duty. Until 2003 all GPs were responsible for the care of their patients out-of-hours.

Then a bungled contract negotiated by the last Labour government allowed GPs to opt out of night-time care – at the same time as receiving a huge pay rise.

Hospital doctors’ hours have been cut as a result of the European Working Time Directive which limits most workers to a 48-hour week and which has applied to doctors since 2009.

In a report last year Sir John Temple warned of the havoc the directive was causing to the quality of hospital care. Trainees, he warned, were being put in sole charge of care of patients at the weekend, often with no access even to a consultant when they were unsure of a patient’s condition.

One of his recommendations was that a consultant must always be in ultimate charge of patients’ care. Yet it seems to have been a message that was lost on our sleepier hospitals.

The irony is that Britain was supposed to be exempt from the European Working Time Directive – it was subject to an opt-out negotiated by former Prime Minister John Major in return for forcing the Maastrict Treaty past his reluctant MPs in the early Nineties.

But the EU proceeded to push it through the back door instead and Tony Blair capitulated.

No one wants to go back to the days when bleary-eyed junior doctors were working 90 hours a week, that was lethal in itself.

But surely the rules need to be flexible enough to make sure that senior doctors are always available. We have ended up with an NHS stuffed with administrators employed to count doctors’ hours – while patients languish uncared for in bed.

The best hospitals, concludes the Dr Foster report, still manage to provide proper cover at the weekend in spite of the Working Time Directive.

In London, for example, all stroke patients are now treated in one of eight specialist stroke units which have consultants on duty 24 hours a day.

As a result the number dying of strokes in London has plummeted. The trouble is that there is an inbuilt resistance to change among many NHS staff.